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Okay. I know it has been a REALLY long time since my last post. It’s not because I have been lazy – in the past few months I have spent much of my energy founding Curiosity Collider, a non-profit focus on innovative and interdisciplinary ways to experience science. Plus, at some point my personal life needs to take priority 😀 Now that things are moving along quite nicely, maybe I will start writing a little more…

The Field Prize: Maryam Mirzakhani became the first female winner for the prestigious Field Medal in mathematics. A bitter sweet moment, to tell the truth, because for whatever reason no other woman has received the prize since its inception in 1936. I couldn’t help but ask why, and wonder how many other outstanding women have been overlooked when it comes to prestigious awards in STEM?

Freeze your eggs now: This is the year we learnt that instead of providing a supportive work environment for childbearing employees, tech companies like Facebook and Apple decided to offer them the “benefit” to freeze their eggs. To whose benefit is this, really? Because otherwise women cannot commit to their work? So that the company can hire or promote those who don’t have children until later in their lives? Will women who decide to freeze their eggs now still keep their jobs later on if they do on on to have children? And who is going to take the responsibility if the frozen eggs lose their ability to be fertilized?

Let’s talk about Women in STEM: This is the year that we learnt talking about being a woman in STEM could be more difficult than you think, as experienced by these three female MIT computer scientists. Did they brought it on to themselves? Would things have been different if they avoided the gender topic? (Probably not…) You are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

And don’t worry, there is a silver lining: if you go to visit the AMA now that it’s over, most of the more intrusive jabs and demands have been downvoted into oblivion, leaving many questions that did focus on science, tech, academia, and what it’s like to be a woman in these fields—such as this redditor who asked whether or not the three women are treated differently than their male computer scientist colleages, for example.

Opting out: This year, for the first time, a well-educated man said to me, “What’s the problem with having only 15-20% of women in physics? They probably just chose not to go into physics and astronomy.” and then went on to argue how it is so unfair to men that there are more women becoming medical doctors now.

Really?

The increase of female students in medical schools (the ratio is about 55 to 45, female to male now) just happened in the past decade. Not to mention, males are not exactly “under-represented” in the medical field – unlike the 20 to 80 female to male ratio we see in physics and astronomy (probably worse in computer science).

Many of the common, negative depictions of the plight of academic women are based on experiences of older women and data from before the 2000s, and often before the 1990s. That’s not to say that mistreatment doesn’t still occur — but when it does, it is largely anecdotal, or else overgeneralized from small studies. As we found, when the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal, it is limited to a small number of comparisons of men and women involving a single academic rank in a given field on a specific outcome.

Why then, do we not see more women in some STEM fields? In their research paper, they said, sexism isn’t the problem – women are simply choosing to opt out! It is their own choice!

The cause of this is not that women applicants are not being hired, but rather that they are choosing to opt out of academic science.

Ceci and colleagues are simply looking at the outcomes of women’s STEM careers in comparison to men’s, without adequately measuring how these outcomes arise, and how they’re connected to broader socio-economic patterns in society.

Something wrong with the logic that women simply chose to opt out of science, pointed out by PZ Myers on his blog Pharyngula: Yay! Sexism in science is over!

I still hear about teachers who told females students that they can never be physicists (one of my coop students told me that – and she is an Honours physics student now, thank goodness, because she is awesome). I still hear from friends who said that there is no way they will be able to have children right now, given the structure of their tech companies.

It Is not a choice If they don’t see the options.

Not just a woman’s problem: My friend Eric Mills, a physicist and the illustrator for Cartoon Physics, talked about gender issues in his comic strip, Witnessed – covering the sexism he witnessed himself (I highly recommend the comic strip). For example,

Well, because the burden of speaking out about sexism in science and society should not fall only to women. We all need to do our part for a more equal world. And because I still meet men who say they do not see sexism in science, and hence do not see why we should be doing anything about it. To those men, I suggest that perhaps you are simply not looking.

More and more, we see discussions about women in science not just by women anymore. We see these discussions becoming about people in science, about how we should treat each other – and really, that is what this is all about. I love where we are going.

We can do more: This is also the year that we saw a growing number of initiatives to support women in the technology industry. For example, Ladies Learning Codes hosts workshops to introduce website development, coding, even Arduino and electronics to women and youth. There are now organizations such as Women in Communications and Technology, that supports women with careers in communications, digital media, and technology across Canada. In UK, the Athena SWAN Equality Charter aims to work with institutions to address gender issues in science. In fact, the process of becoming a charter member is an opportunity to create a better work environment:

Although I was aware of many issues, the Athena Swan process has also been a bit of an eye opener, and made us all think. Does this meeting really need to be after work? Are we actively pushing our women forwards for senior roles? Do we ensure a good mix of invited key-note speakers to the Institute? We are addressing these areas. And importantly, with the help of our new maternity mentors, we are learning how to deal with the “bump that dare not speak its name”; this is the awkward situation whereby no one knows quite what to say about a pregnancy, for fear of doing the wrong thing.

We also heard about the recent announcement that Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian physicist and the former spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment (yes, the one that discovered the Higgs Boson), will lead CERN, where the world’s largest particle collider resides.

More Women in Science illustrations, please: And just the other day I was thinking about why we don’t have more animations or graphics representing women in STEM (the “Einstein” representation of physicists just don’t work for me anymore). Thanks to Katie McKissick who contributes to the blog Symbiartic, I was introduced to the wonderful illustrations by Rachel Ignotofsky. (Check out Katie’s blog post Women in Science Illustrations for an interview of Rachel). Now, can we have more of these?!

2015: There will continue to be ups and downs for women in science in the coming year. But with each step and each discussion, we are engaging more in thinking about women in STEM – or perhaps, about making STEM a better environment for every single one of us.

Did I miss anything? If I did, please feel free to leave a comment below!

Perhaps it’s because it was all supposed to have changed by now. Dads were supposed to carry more of the load. Motherhood was not supposed to become so idealized. Employers were supposed to be more flexible. Women were supposed to climb higher up the ladder, but feel less guilty. Society was supposed to live up to the promises our mothers made. From single moms to CEOs – a generation of burnt-out, disillusioned moms are waking up and smelling the coffee. Forget having it all – today’s working moms are doing it all. Call it “The Motherload”.

This is hardly a surprise. Assuming that the amount of parenting work remains the same – with women taking on professional careers and spending more time focusing on work, the void must be filled somehow (by men, considering our social structure is not there yet). But, according to the documentary, only 26% of the Canadian fathers take *some* parental leave, vs 88% of the mothers. (Actually, Terry is part of the 26%)

But why is that?

@TheresaLiao What happens in the first months of parenthood sets the template for parental responsibilities. Too many dads opt out early on.

Going further down in the rabbit hole, perhaps I should support this with some data (and also because Pew Research Centre just published the data today and I can’t wait to include this in my post). According to the Pew Research Centre Report: After Decades of Decline, A Rise in Stay-at-Home Mothers, more than 70% of the Americans are supportive of working mothers, yet this support certainly does not fit well with results from another survey done in 2013:

Some 51% of respondents said that children are better off if their mother is at home, while 34% said they are just as well off with a working mother. And, in a separate question, they were asked about fathers and their children. Only 8% of all adults said that children are better off if their father is home and doesn’t hold a job, while 76% said children are just as well off if their father works.

Also, if we look at stay-at-home moms with a college degree, 88% of them have working husbands. This is the group that likely have a better chance of finding a job, and probably with less financial burden, yet why their husbands are the working ones, but not they, is curious (get paid less? cannot find jobs? social pressure to stay at home and care for kids? truly want to stay at home? probably worthy another analysis?). Reading the report, it is not difficult to see how complicated the issue is when you consider marital status, income level, education level, etc etc (hence, more than a gender issue…).

So now the question – how can we tackle this issue?

@TheresaLiao We do need better workplace policies and $ for parenting. But the inequity will persist as long as dads fail to do their share.

Now about having conversations re: women & careers and women in STEM. My personal experience chatting with some male colleagues and friends is that because discussions on these topics usually end up very heated (their impressions are that pretty much anything they said could be considered against women’s rights, or that they don’t understand the issues because they are not women), they would rather avoid conversations about any gender-related issue all together. And, many of these conversations happen in female-dominant meetings, where males are the minority. This could be very uncomfortable for male participants. At one of such meetings that I happened to be at, one presenter made a wiener joke – and I don’t even want to imagine how uncomfortable the two male students in attendance felt (Funny how that we are trying to increase the number of women in STEM, yet we created another minority in the discussion of women in STEM).

This is a huge problem for two reasons. 1. There is no way to know how to better change policy if we only have half of the opinions in the room. 2. Many of those in decision-making roles are still male, and without some buy-in and participation from them, gender-related discussions often reflect to actual changes very, very slowly.

How can we change this? I think more people are aware of the lack of males in discussions regarding women in STEM. For example, in the Women Poised for Discovery and Innovation: Resolving the Remaining Hurdles session (see my Storify of the session) during American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, less than 5% of the session attendees are male, and people started to tweet about it right away. But, perhaps there is more we can do about this. How can we frame this so that it is more than a women’s issue, but something that everyone should participate in the discussion for? Even men in STEM have mothers, daughters, other colleagues they can relate to? What do our male colleagues think of these issues and are they aware these issues could bring instability into the academic environments as a whole? After all, a healthy academic environment must be good for everyone?

This is part 4 and the final part of my series on how gender bias in science is studied. In the past few weeks, I summarized how gender bias in science has been studied: through surveys and interviews (Part 1), through existing data (Part 2), and through experimentation (Part 3). What we have learned is that there is evidence to support gender bias in science, most objectively through experimentation. Now the tough question – what do we do now? And I certainly hope that it doesn’t involve turning the physics department pink.

3. There needs to be some major structural changes with regards to how academic research and tenureship appointment works. For the past hundreds of years, it has been assumed that academic careers are taken up by men who do not need to make time for their families, and who are comfortable with leaving their families behind to advance their careers. This is unfair for both men and women, and creates a hostile environment toward women and pregnancy. And believe me, students are already thinking about the bad rep of an academic career when they are in undergrad. Just check out this question by a student during UBC Science’s 50th Anniversary Lecture – Science: The Gender Dimension.

No one is claiming that juggling a career in physics while raising children is easy. But having a family while establishing a career as a doctor or a lawyer isn’t exactly easy either, and that doesn’t prevent women from pursuing those callings.

The chance is that, it is more than providing child care services or parental leave, but also about whether people in academia welcome such practice. We have had a bad rep for long enough – changes in the system could provide a positive view of academic careers as a whole for female students who are just starting their academic career.

4. We should continue to encourage female students to consider STEM careers in their future. The reality is that if a girl does not take high school level science courses (physics, chemistry, biology), she will not fulfill the requirement for taking upper-level first year university science courses – this becomes a barrier for the girl to enter a physical science degree program. According to the US Department of Education, by grade 8 you can see the level of interest in science diverging between boys and girls – this means that we need to start early in order to sustain girls’ interest in science. There were many ideas about how this should happen, but trying to figure out which one works is a delicate matter – many suggestions are based on surveys or personal experiences, which suffer from recall bias. I again hope to see more longitudinal data on which strategies influence girls positively (without negatively discouraging boys). I also want to point out that I don’t yet see evidence for the following two strategies. One is to turn everything pink – you probably already know how I feel about that. If someone can do a study to show how pink wires and capacitors actually get girls to be interested in building with electronics more, I am all for it. The other is to introduce over-feminine role models. The “Science, It’s a Girl Thing” video from the European Commission is a prime example of this:

(Because, right, if girls want to study chemistry then they should all be interested in cosmetics, wear heels, and blow kisses)

One possibility is that…when stereotypes of women become salient, women tend to incorporate those stereotypical traits into their current self-perception. They may then find it harder to imagine themselves as, say, a mechanical engineer.

As women, we need to realize that some of this responsibility does fall on our shoulders, that we should be more supportive of our successful colleagues (and sometimes the difficult decisions they made), and push ourselves further even though there is a risk and we might not win. If we all just sit back and do what is expected of us, the future of women in science will not change for the better.

***

Here are a few other posts/resources to check out. I am also including a list of research references I used in the post at the very end. There is a podcast based on this series in the plan, so look out for that in the future!

The Delusions of Gender, written by Cordelia Fine, is a great book. It shows that our psyche can play tricks on us, regardless of how our conscious minds would like us to think. I highly recommend it.

Athene Donald is a Physics Professor at Cambridge. She writes extensively about gender issues in science on her blog.

Furthermore, it seems that “gender-segregated toys” sell much better. Lego Friends, meant to target girls, turned out to be one of the biggest success for the company. Listen/Read Girls’ Legos Are A Hit, But Why Do Girls Need Special Legos? by NPR. And note that Kinder Surprise is also going for it. I, for one, was personally offended by the following commercial:

(“For showing off”?? And, not that I don’t enjoy dressing up – I actually do read fashion magazines – but is that a girl only thing? What if I want to build robots? Which I certainly did when I was little.)

And that is why while I know that something like Goldieblox, engineering toys for girls, would be popular, and that a swarm of parents would go for it, something doesn’t sit right with me. In one of the workshops that I was involved in running, girls had so much fun playing with circuit boards and wires and lasers (they were building a laser detector) – none of the parts were coloured pink and made with ribbons. They were the exact same electronic parts that we used for workshops with boys. Read Spydergrrl’s post Why I Won’t Be Buying Gender-Segregating Toys Like Goldieblox and Lego Friends. (Updated Nov 18, 2013) And definitely read about Jamie Davis Smith’s personal experience in Getting Over Goldie Blox.

I should mention that I grew up loving both Lego bricks and Barbie dolls. My parents never told me to play with one or the other.